I been lately out of the PC gaming area for a few years now, just playing my wii, ps3, and 360 but after many years I realized that consoles will always be inferior to computers. Not saying that they suck, I still like them but I cannot stand playing FPS games anymore on my consoles.

So I need a powerful computer all around for gaming and for 3d work, especially for high polygon count and rendering.

My Bday is coming up in about 2 months, and it's when I am planning to upgrade. I am not sure how much I will be able to spend oh and also I have never built a computer before, so I'll either have a friend do it for me or a computer store.

What is the latest out there right now? Is there anything new in the next two months?

I need a computer that will be able run majority of the newest games on 50-60 fps at maxed out settings and of course also for rendering process.

I am currently on a laptop with a 1600x1200 hd resolution, Blu-ray player, Windows 7 64 bit., 6 gigs of ram, ATI Mobility HD 4650 512mb vRAM, it runs some games pretty good, but not good enough, however I mainly use my laptop for my university/college classes... Costed me exactly $1000 which is in my mind a good deal for a new modern PC laptop as opposed to the crappy Mac Book Pro that is weaker and is a complete rip off...

I want a new built Desktop PC, I haven't upgraded since 2005... and it's really ****ty now lol

Re: Going back to PC gaming and 3D Work, building a new PC help for Bday

Well if you're planning to upgrade in two months I will advise you to come back in two months and we'll set a build for you. Technology changes very fast, the new i9 will come out, maybe the NVIDIA gts300 series. The i7 920 will be replaced by the i7 930.

Answering to your questions, right now ATI it's the king of GPUs. The new HD5970 it's the most powerful GPU out there.
SLI is for NVIDIA and Crossfire is for ATI. It's when you combine two cards of the same model so you can have more processing power.
Intel has the most powerful processors while AMD have better performance/cost ratio. In your case you should get Intel.
In my opinion you should buy 6GB of RAM and if necessary buy another 6GB later on.

Re: Going back to PC gaming and 3D Work, building a new PC help for Bday

Quote:

Originally Posted by Northelim

hm... I see... well interesting...

By the way is it worth buying 8 or 12 core processors?

Also, what do you mean by Full ATX Tower?

No such thing yet im affraid. But the idea is right, the more cores the better for 3D work. The majority of 3D renders (such as Mental Ray that comes with 3ds Max) greatly benifit from multithreading, ie. more cores.

Unlike with other programs and games, if you say, double the amount of cores you will pretty much double your rendering power and pretty much halve your rendering time. The LGA1366 i7 processors will be the best for you (4 cores, 8 threads), however, you will want to consider the i9 coming out soon (6cores, 12 threads). That is your best bet.

Graphics cards wont have an effect on rendering, so keep that it mind. It will help with general viewport use and speed up moving around complex scenes. So if you have millions of polys in your scenes, then you will want some serious graphics power such as a HD5870, or even two. But I run a single GTX285 (a fair bit slower) and its still good for fairly heave scenes (say a million polys).

A full ATX tower is a type of case. There are different form factors like ATX, miniATX and so on. A full tower is a larger case to allow for more equipment, better cooling etc. and will be based on the ATX form factor.